In the past, semiconductor devices were provided with leads extending outwardly from a semiconductor unit and these leads often needed to be bent so that they could, for example, extend through via holes in a printed circuit board thereby interconnecting a number of these semiconductor devices into a desired circuit or system. The related method of manufacture of the semiconductor device with the leads therefore included inserting the leads of the semiconductor device at a station prior to forming the plastic encapsulation that united the leads to the semiconductor portion and included packaging the semiconductor device at the assembly line last station with the leads extending outwardly (unformed) parallel to the semiconductor portion of the device. Usually, a totally separate lead bending operation was carried out to bend the leads to a desired configuration for a particular intended purpose prior to a subsequent and separate packaging procedure that was needed to both support and package the semiconductor device with its bent leads.
One problem with the prior art method of bending the leads and subsequently packaging the semiconductor device with the bent leads is that it was difficult to minimize or reduce the labor time and resultant costs for packaging the semiconductor device with bent leads. Another problem was to avoid damaging the bent leads (which need to be kept bent in accordance with a pre-set specification) during the process of packaging the semiconductor device.